Mastering the Art of Link Building (Part 1) Ep. 597

howdy welcome back to another fun-filled episode of the unknown secrets of internet marketing i'm your seo consultant matt bertram for today i have a great topic for you it's a topic that i've started to cover in my masterminds um and if you have an interest in that i will uh add the link in the show notes uh so hopefully you'll get some value of this because i don't typically share uh this depth of stuff so uh let's go ahead and jump into it well i guess before we do that let's read a quick review uh this is from thomas turner with baker signs one of our long-time clients edwr has done an amazing job for us over the years uh we have stood out in our industry with our continually evolving website and have seen incredible growth thanks to our search engine rankings and web presence thanks to ewr support and guidance and we have become a standout with our brand and experience success beyond our original markets with this team you can rest easy knowing that you are staying competitive in a rapidly changing world thanks so much uh patiff to uh tom uh thomas over there at baker signs um yeah so uh we've been doing website development and seo for a long time we started off as a web design company um quickly moved into seo because people want to rank at google and generate leads uh very very powerful um there's different parts of seo uh for you new listeners we have a lot of new listeners we're expanding into new markets um so uh you know there's technical seo there's a local seo there's there's on page and there's off page and today we're going to be covering off page seo and before i get into it i really want to lay the foundation to let everyone know that off page is like another layer on the cake it's not the foundational strategy and typically when you look at a lot of services and i'm not going to say all

services but a lot of services that i see that are being advertised to me on social media for the very low seo uh you know low dollar value for seo services typically what they're doing is they're running spammy links to your website they're getting you an initial pop based on uh like what's it called it's hive theory no it's um you know it's like bees or or birds right where they kind of uh buzz around and see what's going on it creates a lot of activity it's kind of how the uh new search engines work i'm using the wrong terminology here uh swarm that's what it is swarm theory so essentially um uh you know you generate a lot of blinks you generate a lot of signals uh you know the swarm of spiders come and check out your site and then they find out well there's not really a lot going on and it leaves and so you get a temporary bump and then quite a large dip after that and then you know if you're misleading the algorithms they will penalize you for it so um it's kind of like a shot of uh i don't know energy uh um but it doesn't last and it it actually detrimentally hurts you in the long run and the algorithm never forgets uh any links that are generated your site sometimes you have to do uh disavow so i'm not saying all but a lot of these lower cost seo services where they don't even touch your website and they're driving off page links to you i would encourage you to stay away from if you're trying to build a long-term brand now if you're doing affiliate marketing stuff like that um you have a burn site you know hey that that is not what we're really covering here um on this podcast uh it's it's not for me it's not for uh our clients so that's not something we pursue um off page seo is really you lay a good foundation the site you

do um all the different on page stuff you you set the foundational structure of the site and then once you get to a level you start adding um well social media marketing is actually off page local seo is actually off page pr is actually maybe considered off page if you're looking at from seo standpoint so anything that's off the site um is off page so you know i would start with your social media profiles and um you know you can sync them together for content syndication right so if you have blogs you can link them together you can push information out uh if there are certain platforms that you use more than others you might want to customize the content for that but getting the shares getting the likes um does send signals also i will tell you like for uh linkedin for example uh how the algorithm works is um you don't want just somebody to like it you want them to comment or even add an emoji uh that has a higher score than just a like or or a different kind of comment uh sorry a different kind of like emoji um in as far as like engagement right so you want them to put the emoji maybe or a short message um in in the the text below the image sorry i'm running a blank here uh long messages are actually worth more so uh and then if you respond to it and it creates that engagement and other people like it then again it sends it sends more signals um but every social media share is actually a link and is sending a certain type of signal now uh the weighting of that does change uh same thing for let's say press releases right that's another off-page strategy it's not necessarily the press release you do it's if other bloggers and other news um outlets pick it up and share it then uh that that has the value but not from uh the press release angle so uh kind of

going back to the foundation what i would tell you is you can rank sites all on page okay and we have a lot of sites and a lot of industries that we can rank on page and on page needs to be the fundamental of of what you're working with i'll tell you a quick story uh a couple years ago a client came to me they were using i don't know some large agency i forget the name of it out of florida uh and um basically they never had access to the site and they were spent so so the seo agency never had access to the site they were spending i think five thousand to ten thousand dollars a month and typically it's like off page link building right it was even worse than that it was actually uh the the seo agency had built a giant pbn a private blog network of their own site and so uh the the client was giving them money to well grow their own site and then they were putting really really spammy links they were manipulating the search engines and the anchor text and not stuff that i'm going to go into here uh but they created tons thousands okay of of links from these sites and then when the client left every month there were thousands of links that were dropping off in tranches and i had to show the client what was going on and why the links were falling and why the traffic was falling and essentially the client has spent i don't know let's say two hundred thousand dollars give or take uh with this company and didn't retain any of the value when they leave that's one of the problems uh or advantages about seo depending on what side of your what side of the fence you're on if someone's doing on page on your site and you leave you get to take all that value with you okay if you're doing the work you have to start over with a new client

and again you got to get to the first page of google and um the top of the first page of google to see any kind of lead volume and that takes uh depends maybe two to four months um you know six months is kind of the rule of thumb on that but typically uh for the google database turnover it's about two months uh so if you're already ranking you can move it up if you're in topical authority yada yada yada but essentially um okay so this client left and is dropping dropping dropping dropping you know we got into the site we fixed a lot of well there was just the site was not being maintained at all and and the link juice was just pushing so much link equity that it was it was shoving it up there temporarily and they had to keep adding links to it because it continued to drop and so that just over time didn't work anymore it was like continued injection of adrenaline it just it didn't work anymore and and so the client was looking for something else and also they were getting kind of spammy links because all the signals were off and it was just horrible so um you know that's an extreme of off-page link building uh that you you need to understand what the seo is doing they're basically your public representative for for what's going on um you know so there's uh different you know i don't even know where that falls on the bell curve but i would tell you um on the other side of the bell curve right so on one side you got like low end um you know spammy links uh rule of thumb for seos if if the and and this is for clients too um if the deliverable that the client has or or sorry the seo has uh looks like non-valuable to you it probably is okay and if you're providing like links and they're not valuable and you don't want to share them with

the client it's probably not something you should be spending your time doing okay um so you know a lot of what google is doing and and what matt cuts and and the whole team well matt cuts is no longer there but like what the what they're a spam team they're trying to reduce online spam um and and a lot of uh if you generate a lot of spam links or you're kind of in that neighborhood you're going to get delisted um for for that page uh and for the word you're trying to rank for especially if you even over optimize that page for it outside the standard deviation you're gonna you know you're gonna get penalized for it like google's trying to reduce spam they're trying to provide good results so if you spend your time and energy doing high quality things um you won't have to be looking over your shoulder it's not a cat and mouse game it you know every google update you'll you'll do better and better and better um if you're focused on the the end user and in that experience so you know off page link building especially these managed services okay so we'll talk about the other end of the spectrum and then there's a lot of people out there that that that here that are listening i bet that are paying thousands of dollars for a turnkey managed service link building okay and if you're one of those people i would encourage you to reach out to me and and we can set up a free consultation i also have some some paid consultation options as well but here's what i'll tell you if you don't know what they're doing and they're your representative i would be careful even though you're paying more it doesn't mean um they're doing a good job they're you know if if they're not actively engaged with you if if you're not understanding what you're getting if you're not evaluating these links they're gonna just get you you know not high quality

links not cheap links maybe better quality than kind of spammy spammy links and and a lot of like directories and stuff like that but but um you know like guest posts you know all this kind of stuff most of it's junk and and i would tell you a lot of these like news sites okay if you think about it um or these multi-content sites um these these multi-content sites that um hold on one second all right sorry someone someone had walked in on me so um what was i saying so a lot of these sites that that are just multi-information you got like let's say you're in a home services space let's say and there's you know roofs and homes and outdoors and then they have like finance and then they have tech and then they have like whatever whatever whatever now you can be a topical authority in all those areas um if you silo everything correctly and you can build an extremely large site however most of these sites are just made to sell links and um they are just you know ai generated um rewriting content most of the content i publish gets rewritten pretty quickly in in you know just it's just a content factory they're just generating stuff that's low quality to drive links and there there's not even a real structure to to how they're linking everything together a link is a citation a link is referencing something okay and so um i would tell you that um it's just a bunch of random links going to a bunch of random places and when you look at how you should be building links think about it like nodes okay um in in kind of uh a data set or um no like topics or um waypoints inside a bigger kind of world or sphere right and so if you have a site that's just randomly spouting links to different places and there's a tool forget the tool um it can show you uh it can actually detect and so

this is a third party tool so do you think that google doesn't have anything better than this but essentially this tool um will tell you if if you're getting a link like on the other side of the the universe of links right or the universe of sites that has no association with you at all it's like on the other side of the universe so you know i don't know what the best analogy is but if you're operating over in this sphere and you're a topical authority in this geographic area and you're interacting with people and you're going to events and you're kind of bumping to people you know you want the links to kind of eventually based on the surfer mentality them coming back to you right at some point like they hit this website they hit this website this is what's like and it comes back to you if someone on the far side of the universe okay um you know links to you it's like what is that that's like so random right and and it can be easily picked up and so understanding um if these sites are are in your kind of vertical are are certainly more important than random sites now uh news sites like a big news site um does carry a lot of weight uh however if there's just one random news site right on the other side of the country that talks about you that looks odd too it would typically be a lot of different news sites right and then there is kind of um like doing press releases press release strategy and things that are looking organic um because you're you're in the news and a lot of people are talking about you and um there's a lot of things happening that's that's really really positive but if you have like one news site randomly talking about you not so good you want like a local news site or if you're a national brand there might be something in the community that you're doing but

there should be some other indication of what's happening than just some like random link so think about this you've got this link service and there's a bunch of lawyers and um other industries where um they're just paying for managed links right and uh typically it takes about eight months i don't know it could take less than that uh depending on on who's selecting the links to actually generate any kind of value you know why because you're just like imagine this universe again you're you're getting random links from all over the place and and depending on how many links you're buying until those links there's some kind of connection there it's like the circuit doesn't connect okay and so um you're not getting any real value for uh like google decides if if this link's going to push link equity or not the same thing with like no follow links um if you know like it will decide if it it matters or not right and they're looking at all these different kind of associations and so all i guess the bottom line here um and i'll go into kind of the the theory uh or my theory uh on on how this is working and and let me just say um you know the strategies that we employ i can see in the data i need to do a better job of pushing out some case studies but you know we get you in the top 100 right and so you're in the game and and if you're in the top 100 you're at least pushing some kind of link equity a lot of times google doesn't even uh index a lot of this stuff and and again these bigger sites you do get indexed and there there's a certain amount of link equity that happens from that but also um i will go into some of the details but the link equity is distributed well some people say evenly and and i've seen in the data uh you know actually um there's two links

on the page uh based on where their place push a little bit more link equity and sometimes google even decides uh what pushes links and also uh image the the first image on the page sometimes pushes link equity but again google determines this based on um in reference to everything else right so if you're randomly generating signals until there's some kind of association it's like the circuit doesn't get completed it doesn't get connected and so um it could take a long time for that that seo strategy to work and a lot of money and there's a lot of links that are being generated that are not valuable to you so um i do want to try to cover in this podcast at least at a high level what to look for uh when you're paying for a linking service and they're just sending you a bunch of random links and you're just like okay that looks good right because it's not necessarily the case um there's a lot of great third-party tools that help you see different things based upon um this website and this links uh these links as well as strategies to even quote-unquote power up these links that means um there's different tiers okay of links on links on links right links to links to links so building um maybe uh it's called link sculpting or a linking strategy here's what i can tell you okay um most people and and and there are some enterprise level brands that link building works great for for the majority if not all small businesses you do not need off-page link building okay i'll say that again for most small businesses you do not need off-page even in a competitive industry i have some national brands that on page and then you know we can leverage some web 2.0s that we control but i can generate um and create the signals that i need to create totally white hat without the need of additional um uh sources or of link equity essentially if you optimize

and you flatten that kind of yield curve or i don't know if that's the right terminology but but if you if you narrow the focus of where those that link equity is being pointed and you understand um how to to do forward linking you know interlinking back linking whatever you want to call it um you can focus and point the link equity of where you want it okay and so typically a a standard site will have enough link equity to to get to the first page and rank um you know there ha there might need to be some content creation and and blogs and pages depending on the size of the site the length the site's been around etc etc um but also leveraging your own social media profiles like if you create a number of social media profiles those are that kind of first uh outer tier and then you have citations right which you know for for google my business for a gps coordinate having citations really important how you do citations um they are valuable now there are studies out there by white spark and a couple others that only about 60 of those citations uh maybe i have that number off a little bit uh even get indexed right because well you're duplicating uh the same description same title all that sort of thing well google looks at them is that valuable or not right so um some of these citation sites are not that valuable they're strategies um to to to make sure that they get indexed if they don't get indexed they don't again push any um link juice um also email campaigns and newsletters right pushing out newsletters to uh former clients leads that sort of thing getting them to click on a link and going to your website right or to your blog or something like that uh can generate a lot of signals and value and and if people share that again if you're creating um high quality content um so hopefully you're following me and

and i know i'm kind of jumping around a little bit and covering uh a lot of things um but link building is not something that that you necessarily need to pursue if you're starting out okay and it's not something you need to worry about you need to focus on on page okay uh and making sure that that site is foundationally set strong and sending the proper signals and then when you need more link equity and more juice you you want to pull that from off page i'm gonna i'm gonna do another uh podcast i'm gonna talk about well all kinds of different creative linking strategies but you're trying to put something out there whether it be a blog or infographic or something like that that other people want to link to that's valuable that other people are potentially searching for also something that uh is not like vanilla that that google already has that they don't need like information uh that that's new that they can index that's useful that's going to be uh one of the top 100 answers to whatever it is that that you're looking for right and so there's a lot of creative linking strategies that you want to employ and i've seen some really expensive linking strategies that people put out there i think uh uh i remember this a couple years ago i had a plastic surgeon i was working with had just paid fifteen thousand dollars for edu linking strategy that wasn't uh very hard to to implement um but it does take some thought and and some effort and and really if you think about it it didn't generate a lot of long-term value okay you want to really think about your brand and how to grow your brand from a public relations standpoint um if you're a bigger company from an investor relations standpoint and and you want to increase your online visibility uh in a way that that is organic and useful and the way that um well a legitimate company would grow and and

reflect online and so uh at as like i have this graphic on i think on our website there's a methodology page and i have this old graphic of like the earth okay and there was like different layers of the earth and it was like your website high converting website you know cro laying the foundational seo seo should be like the atmosphere or kind of like the first layer of everything that you should do which is really more on page and and technical uh core web vitals has a lot to do with it and then now okay now now you're you're talking about off-page linking strategy but i think interlinking um actually fits into that uh first um you know adding uh let's say retargeting before running paid ads a lot of people want to jump into paid ads and they don't have a high converting landing page they run it to like just their basic website or or their home page which is not meant to convert maybe it's an informational site it's not a lead capture uh so so there's a lot of i guess foundational things you can do but i would utilize the link equity that you have first before going to tap new sources and when you're tapping new sources there's a better way to do it because i can also tell you some of these sites that are selling links for example if you buy a link from that or you have a link from a site that buys links okay from a site that buys links you get a link from somebody that's buying links right so one one like kind of touch away if you're associated with that neighborhood that link might not even push any link equity okay and a lot of these links if you're buying and they're buying from big hubs or whatever google can figure this out and uh we'll just say oh that that site's not going to push any value so the money that you're paying for um you know might you

might not be even getting any value from that and if you're buying a bundle of these links well there's probably one or two of them that are slipping through but you're not the full amount of what you're spending you're not receiving back and and let me kind of transition into what you should look for in a link um and then i will uh come back and do another podcast about how to utilize some of these linking strategies again uh you either have time or you have money you can hire somebody if you have the money but you don't have the time to do some of these things and i know some of these things are nice it's like you know turnkey set and forget but man i've i've tried um a lot of these linking services um and and not only like the common ones i've i've used some very very high high profile linking services in the past and i've been extremely disappointed so the price doesn't necessarily mean they're good it just means whoever you're buying that from has a good brand uh potentially and is making more margin um but but it doesn't necessarily mean what the work is good and so i would encourage anyone to uh evaluate understand what they're doing and go hey i don't have time to do this but i want you to do it but i want to kind of know what you're doing or like you hire someone like me i actually have a number of clients that i help evaluate what's happening like let's call it fractional cmo services so so i help kind of oversee give a second opinion manage other vendors um i actually have a call later this week with a big content shop that uh was hired uh by one of our clients and and i'm overseeing and managing that contractor plus a couple other contractors uh and and and then we're doing on page seo for them and then they had this team that we kind of got plugged

into and then i became like the digital strategist managing that and so we added another service of uh cmo services on top of the on page so my team's doing the on page and then i'm coming in as fractional cmo and that works uh really really well too if you have existing relationships we're not trying to um uh you know overturn the apple cart um we just want you to get the most value again one of our missions is to help 1 million businesses grow which i think we've uh six succeeded that um you know but that's uh one of the ethoses when we did start uh ewr digital or eweb results um and and we certainly continue to pursue that um so yeah so we could we could help it in that way but when you're looking at these links okay first thing you want to look at is you're like is this a is this like look at the website just look at the website look at the kind of content is it in your niche is it niche specific if it's not niche specific you know then then you've got to go to different tiers to evaluate maybe is it pushing juice or is it or is it there's two categories i would say niche specific or really really high quality um news okay if it's like a new site you've never heard of and then they maybe use one of the words uh or a target keyword in the word you've got to really evaluate the site of why it was created typically i'd go to the about us page uh and see if there's like a description or um what the site's about um typically if they're blank um so if you're getting a link and you you're buying links you get a list of links and you go to the link and look at it go to the about us page and if there's no really about us or there's some generic description and there's no address or contact

information be suspect it's probably just there for for links for for to sell links to for you know quote unquote seo value right and and and google can can see that pretty easily right you can look at the the terms of service the about us page see if there's contact information if there's not um you know you can already put it into a category if you're thinking about like from a machine learning standpoint um so so look at that and that's suspect um or if it passes muster then then look at the type of content that's being produced and if there's a bunch of random stuff so like if it's a finance site for example and they start talking about crypto or payday loans or or something like that um that that might be outside of the ordinary uh think about that or a remodeling site right a house remodeling site and then it starts talking about you know i mean auto is kind of a touching vertical of maybe home related durable or or home services but it's it's not really specific right you want a site about automotive talking about automotive repair talking about whatever and then you want a site about like remodeling houses or things to do with houses and it's okay if they talk about patios or pools or whatever but a car is a different topical authority right like would you have your contractor uh if that is working on your house work on your car like think about it like that or if you have like a you know a medical site that starts talking about um the top financial planning things whatever right you're like this is a medical site it should have medical expertise you know um you know personal finances is outside that vertical so so look at that so these big sites that just have um all kinds of different categories how valuable is that going to be the analogy i use and i've used this in in different cases is think about a

uh you're going to a restaurant and there's that machine i and i actually know somebody that knows the guy that created ram story uh but you you take the the cup and you're like i want coke or pepsi or spride or duck pepper whatever you want to drink lemonade tea whatever and you push that button right well look at it like that site you want that to be you want it all whatever you want to drink right and you want that site to look that way too if it if it has a bunch of different random stuff it's like oh i'm going to take a little bit of spride and i'm going to do some dr pepper i'm going to mix it in with some tea and lemonade and you could make an interesting drink and i'm not saying you couldn't but but i call it a suicide right like or that's what we used to call it when we were younger and i think there was actually a soft drink that that actually did that just took a bunch of extra flavors and it was like okay soda or something i don't remember but but not helpful to google okay um so so that's the second thing all kinds of um random categories also uh then you can start using tools uh to to look at the on-page structure do they know what they're doing um one of the best telltale indicators is to use something like uh sem rust or hrefs i think you get a couple free searches if if if um if you're not paying for that service uh and and you can look at um what is the anchor text uh what are the keywords it's currently ranking for right and typically that's kind of like a x-ray vision or laser focus and you can even do it with bullion searches in google you can see what what are they ranking for right and a lot of these sites it's so weird like you can see that they're ranking for

some kind of video game or um some kind of like crypto thing or um whatever right like you can see in like are they talking about what it is like you want to be talking about and and like are you in the same neighborhood with them from an expertise standpoint um and so so you can start looking at those tools you can also start looking at their links you know go through it just hover over the links and see if it's linking to stuff that is is similar to you or in the same category or stuff that you might lead to and if it's not that's probably a toxic site and you probably want to stay away from it um i can tell you uh we did have a client come to us this was uh this probably a year ago um and they had paid for a lot of well uh off-page managed service link building and they couldn't figure out why their site wouldn't rank uh we went through an audit uh and essentially we said okay we gotta we gotta um uh disavow a bunch of these links that are really in bad neighborhoods that it looks like you bought links from and so we had to go through a disavow process of stuff that they had spent good money for and then guess what it started ranking it got outside of that uh or back inside that standard deviation so you know again you've heard the analogy or whatever it is um you know too much of a good thing's bad for you uh that's absolutely true if you're thinking about standard deviations if you're thinking about how how google works if if you get outside of um uh what other people would do on kind of this uh sliding scale you get penalized the more you go outside of it okay like so they they put kind of a dampening effect on it uh all the way through till you would maybe uh you know be qualifying for a manual

penalty right but it's going to be algorithmic penalty and what you want to do uh when that happens again that's not the focus of the site is uh grow the site to uh have a ratio that that's inside the standard deviation or you need to unwind some of the work you did uh you can definitely over optimize stuff and and what i can tell you is if you don't know what you're doing with link building or you're jumping in with link building um before it makes sense because there's a natural progression of the growth of a site right and typically if a site is getting links right and it's not ranking for anything yet by itself why is it getting links like what's what would be the reason now they could be doing some other off off uh off internet off pay like off like offline sorry offline strategy um that could be generating this and and then storm theory will come in and try to figure that out if there's like some pr you're at a conference or something like that but but if it can't match up the signals where it's organic it's gonna you're gonna get a pop and then you're gonna get a drop and what you're really looking for is sustainable growth right um so wow we've covered a lot here um you know if you're listening to this on like 2x speed i know i listen to my stuff at like 175 and then i slow it down to 150 if it's too much information uh you might want to listen to some of this again i did drop a lot of nuggets in there but i know i jumped around a little bit um you know i was looking at the the outline here um basics of link building uh you know link building services you know we talked about the sliding scale uh didn't really go into effective outreach strategies uh and how we pursue it and how we make it scalable that's some of the stuff

that we do in our training is um we we train train you in kind of blocks uh so you learn this block and then you add this other block to it and then you you your strategies get more and more complex but again um when when you're at an off page link building that's that's almost like the the sugar or salt okay on top of the meal um it's not the whole meal so um i i think a lot of these people that are paying a lot of money for link building services should probably really investigate if these links are valuable maybe reevaluate it or find somebody like me that can help you evaluate is that a good use of money because you're you're spending a lot of money on that i would even say the same thing about content creation after a certain level there's a depreciating return on value for for blog creation also content creation and i would tell you too um there's tools that you can look at to see if you're even indexed for those blogs and if those blogs are generating links and if they're not that's a big waste of money too i see a ton of clients doing that i mean they have tons of blogs they keep generating more blogs they're not valuable google's not indexing them no one's linking to them and so you're just spending a bunch of money and so again i think it goes back to the strategy and reevaluating uh what you're doing i think you could put that money to better uses um you know maybe setting up a newsletter um reaching out to existing customers keeping that that warm pushing people to to really high quality blogs that you generate um developing a a solid like three month pr strategy that will generate you um link like link equity true link equity uh and link value to to what you're doing and there's absolutely ways to do that that are not that difficult they might take a little bit

of uh coordination a lot of these would be done uh turnkey but initially at the beginning phases of the campaign uh we have to get input from the client um okay and so going on content is key um link worthy material right we we definitely talked about that high quality infographics videos interactive content that's super important you know they say dwell time is not an issue but all the other components that factor into what we call dwell time are all important and google's looking at all those individual factors in all their different algorithms not just dwell dwell time but that's um i kind of a uh a shortcut to to look at if it's valuable uh we talked a little bit about social media and all the social media signals um there are a lot of tools out there that now incorporate how many shares how many likes uh does this content have i would encourage you to build a syndication strategy uh with your content so you're repurposing existing content and you're not um you know doing too too much work um you can set up automations you can use um you can delegate some of this stuff to to maybe uh vas or agencies uh to to get this working so you focus on creating one piece of content and then push it out over multiple channels which is was quite effective um because it's original content and and you're you're distributing it um um and then there there are some hurdles we talked about uh some of the concerns the penalties um you know algorithmic changes hey algorithm change typically takes like two weeks to implement another let's say two months to to fully see what happens when the database turns over um we didn't really go into key performance indicators uh we did talk about i guess a little bit of things to look for when you're looking at uh the individual links and and how to evaluate those uh but i would tell you most of these link building services

which i was considering offering um a link building service but you know not again it's the sugar on top right it's not like it's not something that you you need a whole ton of uh and also that dial of uh off page links which is certainly part of the algorithm has been turned down a lot um and and it certainly sends signals but understanding how to link content together which i just can't cover it in this podcast is absolutely critical and that's a lot of the stuff that we train uh remembering that each link is a citation so i see so many links that people are creating and it's sending like the most random signal and if you don't know what you're doing just send less signals do less links um make sure the links are like linking to something that makes sense right and and just do do less of them so so google can understand what you're trying to say you're trying to communicate uh with google and if you're sending a bunch of random links or you have a bunch of people uh working on a site that that are not in concert to what they're doing there's all these different kind of conversations and signals being sent and it's just it's just not valuable and then typically what you have to do is kind of wait let the signals kind of die down and let and then amplify uh the the quality signals um or let google kind of sort it out because people come to the site people interact with the site google can kind of figure it out over time that's the same thing with like paid strategies paid strategies get that ai working for you uh takes takes a couple months uh for it to really understand and then man it starts to really hit um solidly so um i haven't done a podcast about link building in a while uh hopefully got a ton of value out of this i would ask um hey uh we are

expanding into canada uh we're working with a number of uh companies um north of houston so if you if you know anybody uh in canada please uh share this uh podcast with uh if you got value out of it please uh comment or like on whatever platform you're listening to really would appreciate it um hey uh i will put links in the show notes if you you know set up a free consultation with us uh if you want to go really deep on your stuff set up a paid consultation and get me directly um you know we we are starting a mastermind course we are starting a a small business training course i know a lot of people have had interest in that um we're a little quarter behind on that we've been pretty busy uh with with new business uh since the beginning of the year uh into last year uh but we will be rolling that out uh thank you so much for your support there are ways to support this podcast hopefully you get it get value out of it really the initial reason we started this podcast was to disseminate information among our team and this was well 13 i think 13 years ago um before podcasting was what it is today um and and so it is a very effective kind of uh training vehicle and and hopefully um you you are finding as such if if you're advanced in seo or you're trying to figure it out and i would just tell you um seo absolutely works i mean i can tell you today and i know there's been a ton of changes over the last 36 months but man like we have it so locked in right now so we'll get them in like top 100 okay and boom we'll get them in the game and then within 30 days typically right in the 60 day window we can pop you up to like first position second position third position um you know it depends on all the

foundational uh stuff that you're laying out but man you get that right uh on on some of our uh long-term clients uh all that stuff is on point and and you know we'll go into a new uh a new keyword set and just absolutely crush it and and then each quarter we just keep adding and adding more traffic so if that that keyword or that page is producing you know one two leads a week or one or two leads a month it just depends based on on your niche and um how long tail you want to go uh and then you just keep adding to it you start getting we have clients that are getting literally 15 to 25 to we have one getting like 30 something i don't know it kind of varies uh because uh they're top three for i think 160 keywords right and so we have some clients that are just generating so much business um it's it's awesome and uh so i don't know if you if you need any help reach out to us if you want to grow uh your business online with the gosh i need to write this down but uh the most powerful tool on the planet the internet uh call us uh get on our calendar uh for increased revenue in your business uh there is a free consultation link up in the upper hand corner if you go to ewrdigital.com uh thank you so much for your support hopefully you found this valuable i know i went a little long today uh thank you again until the next time my name is matt bertram bye bye for now